Moloth - The M-Forums

Hmmm.... hard to say. It does seem to be a believable transformation over time though. If you  remember his old specials, a lot of it was very politically incorrect. A lot of it could be considered offensive, but it was usually based on truths and observations. But he never seemed to pick on any one group in particular. Everyone was fair game to be criticised for being stupidity - men, women, blacks, hispanics, gays, babies... If Gallagher saw something retarded, he'd make fun of it.

One of the common tropes of life is that as we get older, we become less adaptive. The older people get, the less able they are to accept changes around them. It's very possible that as Gallagher has aged, the stupid things about people he observed have worn him down to the point where he doesn't just mock them, he hates them.  It's sad to see the idealism of a man devoted to bringing thinking and laughter to his audience destroyed by the incessant horribleness of the world around him.

Or it's just possible he was doing what every smart entertainer does - giving the audience what it wants. Thinking of it that way makes him seem like more of a sell out, but it's less depressing than the alternative.

First hand account, posted on a Metafilter discussion about Gallagher some time ago:

http://www.metafilter.com/88018/Gallagher

Hm. I was just checking Metafilter before I called Gallagher. (He's on my cell phone favorites, right below my parents.) This will probably be a long post.

Filthy Light Thief, that clip you saw on TV was from my documentary, "History of the Joke with Lewis Black." (Penn and Teller were in it.) It was originally called "The Greatest Joke Ever Told," but the title was changed a few weeks before broadcast. (Don't get me started.)

Of the 100 or so comedians we contacted, Gallagher was the first to respond, and among the most accommodating. (He was on my Top 10 list, along with Black and Chris Elliott.) When you contact Gallagher for a press appearance, you're given a smash-able shopping list: 4 jars of Jiff peanut butter; a whole watermelon; diapers; Prell shampoo; you get the idea. I dutifully sent my minions shopping, hired a van to carry the stuff in, outfitted the crew of 20 in Hazmat suits and yellow construction helmets, and saddled up on a glorious and hot autumn day in L.A. We caravanned out to Gallagher's redoubt in Calabasas, which is just over the hills from Malibu. (Contrary to what was mentioned in a post above, the guy has handled his money very well.) Gallagher's house is a Spanish-style hacienda that was probably once pretty swanky; now it looks like something out of a M.A.S.H. episode, with a metal security gate that appears to have been smashed in by a tank, and decades of Gallagher props everywhere, from a foam-rubber steamroller to giant bowling pins. All of my guys were afraid to climb the long, steep driveway, for fear of what lay ahead. So, being the leader, I hiked up the hill with my cameraman, a 50-something recent cancer survivor who looks like a portly Van Gogh. When we puffed to the top of the hill, there was Gallagher. And the minute he saw us, he started performing. He had already bought all the foodstuffs on his list; he had prepared a 3-hour routine just for us (which was reduced to about 90 seconds of screen time). And he was funny. Sometimes ha-ha funny, but mostly "I can't believe this is happening" funny.

So here's the point: Gallagher is a professional. And being a professional comedian is a hard, weird job that breaks people in interesting ways -- more interesting, to me at least, than the way other vocations and life circumstances break people. He's a guy who thinks deeply about things whose job is to provide mindless entertainment. He's a Kafkaesque character -- or maybe a Serlingesque one.

I spent over a year of my life sweating blood and neglecting my family to get "History of the Joke" made; I had envisioned it as a definitive, cast-of-thousands documentary about comedians and the real hard work that goes into telling a simple joke -- a more accessible (and perhaps even more entertaining) version of "The Aristocrats," which I loved. "Joke" came close, even if the forces of mediocrity, mendacity, garden-variety stupidity and borderline evil that is the television industry took big fat bites out of it (and out of me) along the way.

But the greatest thing that came out of it was, for me, an appreciation of just how hard it is to be a standup comedian, full-time. (As opposed to a sit-down talk-show host, movie writer, script consultant, animation voice, and/or "humorist.") It's not a normal job. And it's doubly not normal if you are normal -- meaning, you're an adult with kids and a brain that thinks about current events, politics, morality, and your own mortality. This is the kind of man Gallagher is... or at least that's how he started out.

To age gracefully in standup -- meaning, to work steadily into your golden years -- comedians must do one of two things: Change their act to reflect the times, or hit on a schtick that works, and stick with it no matter what. (Or they can just die young, their best jokes frozen in amber with the headlines of the day.) George Carlin is an example of the former. He was in "History of Joke," too, and in addition to being a graceful, sweet, and generous guy, he was the only old dude I knew with an iPhone, who knew how to use it. His anti-establishment rants gave way to metaphysical musings that were just as radical and more fitting to the times; to suggest that there was no god in the time of Bush -- and in the months before his own death -- was just as thought-provoking, and more suited to his and our times, than saying fuck-shit-piss, et al, on TV.

Gallagher, however, is an example of the latter. He found what worked in his act, and over the years he stripped away everything that didn't. He knows what pushes people's buttons; he knows what will fill the seats. Smashing. Everyone comes for the smashing.

If you go back and watch Gallagher's TV specials from the 70s and 80s, you'll see that they were filled with topical and political humor, as his shows are today. It's just that nobody much cared. They were there for the smashing, the Giant Couch, and the goopy insults -- and Gallagher gave the audience what they wanted. Problem is, of course, that over the years Gallagher's core audience has shrunk, and moved toward the middle of the country. So when he performs at the West Buttfuck Community Theater or Kap'n Kurt's Krab Shack, full of drunken yahoos on spring break, the seats are always filled. Which suits Gallagher just fine. It's a choice, and one he made a long time ago.

When Gallagher rails against his contemporaries (Letterman, Leno) and their success, he's really complaining about their audiences. The audience for topical political humor has grown steadily over the decades, and those comedians rode the wave, tacking masterfully here and there to keep on its leading edge. The audience for food-smashing and mild right-wing rants has been steady, solid, and reliable; but it's shrinking.

And so is Gallagher. But he's fighting mortality with everything he's got. And he's doing it, if not with class, then with a kind of alternately stirring and heartbreaking honesty that is hard for some folks to understand. He means everything he says; and it's only when we try to pick out the golden kernels of folksy brilliance from the sludge of shut-up-grampa-you're-embarrassing-me logorrhea that we get what Gallagher is all about.

The stuff I find most fascinating is Gallagher's interaction with his audience -- e..g, his genuine desire to set kids on the straight and narrow, his put-downs of hecklers, and his seemingly Job-like ability to endure physical and psychic humiliations that would cow or creep out most open-mike punters -- which IMO has nothing to do with comedy, and has everything to do with being a 63-year old guy with several ex-wives, grown children, and a heart attack under his belt who can't stop working, and is terrified of what happens when he does.

I've been talking to Gallagher for the past 2 years, trying to figure out how to convey his combination of arrogance, brilliance, flat-earth conservatism and balls-out fuck-y'all capital-A American freethinking in a filmic way, and have yet to crack that nut. I have been in every studio building in Los Angeles and environs, trying to get a little cash to show the people what I know. But most everyone declares that he's a bitter old crank with a moldy act who confuses and offends people. To which I say, sure -- but he's entertaining as fuck. And isn't that the point?